CHAPTER SEVEN: THE SPARRING CONTEST
2019 Words
Three weeks post-Calabar, the Council absorbed its newest blood, sixteen raw recruits forged in fire.
The Selection:
4 recruits paired with 4 elite fighters
30-day crucible: weapons mastery, live combat, neural conditioning.
The Inheritance:
Dead Mavericks’ call signs recycled onto fresh shoulders, their legacies reduced to serial numbers waiting for new owners.
Among Aisha's new trainees stood a wide-eyed ten-year-old, smaller than his rifle, trembling despite the neural implant drilled into his skull.
His memories bled through the implant's suppression.
"They promised... Mama would come…”
16/50 times did they experience this delay but his case was the worst in their history
Vice Commander Amarachi sedated him weekly, restarting his implant with voltage that made his small body convulse.
Aisha noted his file:
"Maverick-920: Memory retention persists. Recommend increased suppression or disposal."
His mother had burned alive in Calabar, he was crying for a ghost the implant couldn’t erase.
Commander Idowu’s order crackled through the barracks:
"Combat assessment in 60 minutes. Prove your worth or become waste."
Aisha and Richard drilled their recruits in the Council’s killing calculus:
Fist trajectories measured in degrees
Duck timings calculated to 0.3-second margins
Jab anticipation via neural implant micro-tremor analysis.
Then, the glitch…
Maverick-920, the memory-haunted boy, froze when paired with a female recruit.
"Why refuse?" Amarachi’s voice carried the edge of a scalpel.
The boy’s hands shook. "My mama said... never hit women." A flicker of his pre-implant self surfaced, raw and desperate. "She’ll call me a disgrace if she sees me now."
The training hall fell silent. Even the neural implants seemed to stutter in his skull.
She stepped forward, eyes blank, her implant fully suppressed. "I am not a woman. I am Maverick-411."
A stunned silence gripped the training hall. Even the ever-stoic Council officials exchanged glances, this had never happened in a decade of neural programming.
The Mavericks stood frozen, their confusion as palpable as a politician’s empty campaign promises.
Vice Commander Amarachi’s fingers twitched toward her data pad. The recalibration should’ve worked. She’d supervised the procedure herself yesterday. But the boy’s memories kept resurfacing like a stubborn weed through concrete.
Then, a ripple effect.
Zainab’s hand flew to her temple as a rogue memory breached her implant’s defenses:
Her mother’s kitchen, steam curling from a pot of tuwo.
The rhythmic slap of kneading sorghum dough.
The implant’s failsafe voice sliced through the nostalgia:
"Dangerous thoughts, Maverick-556. Terminate hallucination immediately."
She crushed the memory like a cigarette butt, exhaling through her nose. The scent of tuwo dissolved into sterile air.
Aisha recognized the signs, this was how her own resistance had started but she quickly killed the thought in her mind like a smoke.
Amarachi crouched to his eye level, her voice a honeyed blade.
"Listen well, little warrior. Your mother won’t see this. I’ll make sure of it." Her gloved hand brushed his hair, lingering near his neural implant port. "But that girl? She’s already counting you as weak."
She tilted his chin toward the sparring circle, where the female recruit cracked her knuckles with mechanical precision.
"Choose! Will you let her shame you? Or will you prove to yourself, to her, to the people watching, that you’re no coward?" Her thumb pressed his pulse point, just shy of painful. "Competitions build legends... or break children. Which will you be?.”
Ehimen hesitated, then raised his fists, the girl across from him already bouncing on the balls of her feet, her neural implant’s combat algorithms flickering in her pupils.
She feinted left, then drove a right hook toward his temple. Ehimen barely dodged, feeling the wind of her punch brush his cheek.
"Stop anticipating, read her!" Aisha snapped at her trainee. "She’s leading with her right twice. Next one’s a knee to your ribs!".
The girl faked another right hook, just as Aisha predicted, then pivoted to drive her knee upward. But Ehimen had seen the pattern. He blocked with his elbow, grabbed her thigh, and…
CRACK.
His counter-punch landed flush on her ribs. She staggered back, gasping, one hand clutching her side.
Richard lunged forward only for Idowu’s cane to hook his arm, yanking him back. "Let it play out," the Commander murmured, eyes locked on Ehimen.
“I want to see if the boy hesitates again."
She spat blood, then charged low, tackling Ehimen to the mat. They rolled, her fingers scrambling for his eyes, a dirty trick drilled into all recruits.
Ehimen headbutted her, breaking her grip, and pinned her. "Yield," he panted.
The girl freed herself, fists up, jab, cross, hook, a rapid combo Ehimen barely blocked. He had learned fast.
"Stop bracing, move!" she barked. He weaved under the next punch, countering with a sharp kidney shot. The girl grunted but spun into a roundhouse kick.
Ehimen caught her ankle, yanked her off-balance, and c***k a well-placed elbow to her ribs sent her crashing to the mat.
He raised his fist, aiming to strike her temple…
"HOLD!"
Amarachi’s voice split the air like a whip. The room froze.
She strode forward, eyes locked on Ehimen. "This boy," she announced, "just fought like a Maverick should."
The hall erupted in applause. Ehimen stood breathless, rubbing his bruised knuckles as a lopsided grin spread across his face.
The girl limped over, her free hand gripping her ribs, and gave his shoulder a single approving tap.
The rule was clear and simple.
Winners keep fighting until they lose.
Ehimen fought four consecutive rounds dodging, striking, adapting
Until he finally fell to a spinning kick from Maverick-902, a girl with wire-wrapped fists.
Aisha watched him crumple to the mat, chest heaving, lips split but eyes still defiant.
This was her.
The same stubborn fire she’d carried her first day. The same unbroken will the Council had tried to scour from her.
Now it lived in him.
And for the first time in years, Aisha felt the ghost of an old instinct.
“Protect him. No matter the cost.”
The sparring champion earned double rations for two nights, a luxury in the mess hall where calories were counted like bullets.
Next is Marksmanship mastery
Gun Anatomy:
Dismantleeassemble blindfolded - standard time: under 18 seconds.
Identify ammunition type by weight - e.g., 5.56mm vs 7.62mm by feel alone.
Lethality Calculus:
Memorize kill radius of each weapon. Assign guns per mission type - urban ops = suppressed pistols, open war = plasma rifles.
Live Drills:
Efficiency Tests: Fire 10 rounds, then recite ballistics data mid-reload
Blood Cost: Calculate how many bullets equal one enemy HK unit; average: 37 rounds.
Zainab moved down the firing line like a ghost in the smoke, her own rifle slung across her back. This was her domain, where bullets spoke louder than words.
Her Drills:
Blind Faith – Dismantleeload AK-47s in total darkness.
Kill Math – Calculate headshots while sprinting, e.g., "Wind speed: 8mph. Adjust 2 clicks right."
Blood Efficiency – Put exactly 3 rounds into a target’s heart, no more, no less.
Her famous saying was, “A gun is just a tool. You are the weapon."
Zainab placed a loaded Glock in Ehimen's small hands. The weapon felt unnaturally heavy as he shifted it awkwardly to his left hand. She knelt behind him, steadying his grip.
"Aim for the head," she whispered, helping him c**k the pistol.
Ehimen hesitated, took a shaky breath, and fired, the shot grazing just wide of the target.
"Again!" Zainab commanded, her face hardening with intensity.
Zainab stalked between the trainees, her shadow falling over those whose hands trembled. Emeka delivered the ultimatum. "Miss twice? You'll jog the perimeter, ten pushups for every target you failed to hit."
Ehimen squeezed his eyes shut, and saw her.
His mother's specter, clear as gun smoke:
"Child, drop that thing now!" Her voice cracked like palm kernels in fire. "If you pull that trigger, you are dead to me!". She said in Urhobo language.
The Glock clattered to the shiny concrete. Tears cut through the gunpowder dust on his cheeks.
Emeka grabbed his shoulders. "What's wrong?"
Zainab loomed behind him, silent.
"Mama... she said..." Ehimen's Urhobo thickened with panic. "No guns. Never guns."
The training range fell silent. Even the ever-present hum of the ventilation systems seemed to pause. Ehimen’s small frame trembled, his breath coming in ragged hitches as he stared at the fallen Glock. His mother’s voice still ringing in his skull.
Zainab didn’t move. Didn’t speak. For a long moment, the only sound was the drip-drip of Ehimen’s tears hitting the concrete.
Then…
"Look at me."
Her voice wasn’t the razor-edged command of a sniper. It was lower. Softer. The tone she only used when the nightmares got too loud.
Ehimen lifted his gaze.
Zainab knelt before him, her calloused fingers tilting his chin up with surprising gentleness. "Your mother is not here," she said, her voice low and urgent. "But I am." She pressed the Glock back into his trembling hands. "And I'm telling you,
survive."
A beat of silence. Then, softer.
"Survive... so one day, you can look the monsters who took her straight in the eye."
A flicker of pain crossed her face, so fast only Aisha, watching from the shadows, caught it.
Her words struck like a bullet to the chest. Ehimen's breath hitched… but his grip on the gun steadied.
His mother’s voice still screamed in his skull, but beneath it… another memory.
The crackle of flames. The weight of her shoving him into that drainage pipe. Her last words: "Live, ọmọ rẹ mi. No matter what."
The gun stopped shaking.
BANG!
The shot struck dead center.
That night, Aisha found Ehimen curled in the barracks’ darkest corner, clutching a single bullet casing like a sacred totem.
"She’d hate me now," he whispered.
Aisha didn’t lie. Didn’t offer empty comfort. She simply sat beside him and slid her own keepsake into his palm, a twisted piece of shrapnel from her first kill.
"Hate isn’t the worst thing to carry," she said. "Regret is."
Somewhere in the compound, Vice Commander Amarachi reviewed the day’s footage, her polished nails tapping against Ehimen’s neural readouts.
>> SUBJECT: MAVERICK-920
>> MEMORY RECURRENCE: 89%
>> RECOMMENDATION: TERMINAL RECALIBRATION
She smiled and reached for the voltage regulator.
Three Hours Later
Vice Commander Amarachi's gloves were slick with cerebrospinal fluid as she adjusted the neural spike embedded in Ehimen's skull. The boy lay motionless on the operating table, his eyelids fluttering with involuntary tremors.
"Increase voltage by 15%," she ordered, her voice calm despite the sweat beading on her brow.
Lieutenant Tayo hesitated, his fingers hovering over the controls. "At this level, we risk…"
"Do it."
The machine whined as another surge of electricity coursed through Ehimen's brain. His back arched off the table, muscles seizing…
…then collapsed.
Silence.
Amarachi watched the neural scans with hawk-like intensity. The erratic memory waves that had plagued Ehimen's implant for weeks... smoothed. Flattened.
"Well?" Tayo muttered, wiping his forehead.
A slow smile spread across Amarachi's face. "Perfect suppression."
Tayo exhaled. They both knew what "alternative measures" would have been required if this failed.
Aisha found Zainab on the rooftop later that night, her sniper rifle disassembled across her lap.
"They wiped him clean," Aisha said quietly.
Zainab didn't look up. "I know."
Below them, through the reinforced glass of the mess hall, Ehimen sat with the other recruits, laughing at some joke, his eyes empty of ghosts.
"He doesn't remember her voice anymore," Aisha added.
Zainab's hands stilled on her rifle. "Good."
But the way she said it, like the word tasted of ash, told Aisha everything.
Somewhere in the compound, Bayo's screens flickered with a new alert.
>> NEURAL SYNCHRONIZATION EVENT
>> ORIGIN: UNKNOWN
A message blinked on his private screen:
>> THEY'RE USING THE CHILDREN AS RELAYS
>> THE RAID AT ERUWA WAS PLANNED BY…
Footsteps were heard Bayo swiped the screen just as Lieutenant Tayo's shadow fell across his workstation.
"Problem, 003?"
"Just optimizing tomorrow's training algorithms, sir." Bayo smiled his most vacant smile.
Tayo's glove creaked as he squeezed Bayo's shoulder. "See that you do."
He then copied it to a hidden drive labeled.
>> ERUWA EVIDENCE LOCKER
- Writer
